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hypnosec writes "Research institute CERN has launched a new project to tap into the extra computing power from the public for its Large Hadron Collider atom smashing project. According to the organization, the LHC@home project will, for the first time, allow volunteers to aid in high-energy collisions of protons in CERN's Large Hadron Collider and in turn helping physicists to unravel the mysteries of the origin of the universe"

They already give you their profit: they further knowledge _and share it freely_. Do you think CERN is a profit-driven organization? It's funded by fees from its member states, about 1G CHF worth a year.

You mean they give me the knowledge I paid $14 billion for them to get. Ain't no "freely" about that. And someone ended up with that $14 billion, and will get the knowledge as well. If I'm not deliberately volunteering to effort the discovery, then I want my cut of both. But if I choose, I can download the program and run it for shits 'n giggles. If that's all the value I find in it.

SO I assume you are current boycotting every PC manufacturer? They all install shit on the computer...except for maybe Apple. I haven't owned an apple computer since the Apple IIc so I won't comment on whether or not the install bloatware.

That's because energy comes from magic. And it will be even more magical when we find the Higgs-Boson! The Higgs-Boson will help us find the cure for cancer & alien life forms, so we won't need Folding or SETI @ home!

It probably wouldn't slow your machine down as much as the other shovelware the put on there that only add bloat.

That said I would prefer they didn't install any of that crap and give you the OS and drivers pre-installed. Then they could give you a disk with what ever other crap they want to bundle, much like ISPs do. You get your modem and then a disk with a bunch of crap that you don't need and in my case sits in a box in my desk drawer with all the other disks of crap in case I need to look at the owne

It probably wouldn't slow your machine down as much as the other shovelware the put on there that only add bloat.

Apart from the whole power consumption issue you'll get a very noisy computer; any program that'll keep your CPU pegged at 100%, no matter how nice the process is, will probably also keep your fan running at max rpm. On second thought, it would be a lot less invasive than a lot of other pre-installed crap which also tend to give your fans a workout.

Your second idea would be good for consumers (and for those of us who help them) to the detriment of manufacturers, which certainly means it'll never happen. I w

Am I the only one who thinks programs like this and/or folding@home and/or seti@home should be installed by the manufacture and enabled by default?

Those @home projects cost between roughly $3 and $30/month per unit to run depending on what equipment you are using (celeron laptop vs i7 gaming rig vs ps3 vs old pentium 4 vs SLI GPUs...) , what the electricity rates are, and whether you end up running running air conditioning more to offset the extra heat you are unknowingly generating.

Me... I have 4 computers always on, but I live in a cooler part of Canada where the heat isn't a huge problem and the electricity is pretty cheap... but they are performance oriented hardware and it would still cost me over $25/month to run @home on all 4.

In some American state's and several european countries electricity is triple or quadruple what I pay. And the extra heat would have to be countered by running the air conditioning more in some places. (In others it might let you run the heater less).

But the point is, there is a very real hidden cost to this stuff, and without full disclosure of the actual cost, these projects are a bit offensive to me.

I have no issue with someone running the software with informed consent, but the true value in dollars that is actually being contributed unwittingly on these projects is appalling.

They are often installed by "kids" or "employees" who do not know the cost, and do not pay it. And the cost is passed on to the parent or employer who have little ability to detect it... its not like a line item on their credit card. Its just a higher kwH reading which is pretty inscrutable.

Preinstalled and enabled by the manufacturers would be tantamount to theft. Why not just subscribe them to World of Warcraft and AOL, and then roll the monthly charges into their property taxes lump sum assessement? Its about as honest.

That's just it. When the PC is idle its power consumption drops right off. Configured half decently the units even sleep/hibernate and the cost of being "almost on" is almost zero. Even the family home servers use a fraction of the power while idling at night. The average family powering a PC for facebook consumes almost no juice. A couple hours of light load a few times a day is NOTHING compared to a slammed at 100% CPU 24x7 for a year.

Then here is what needs to happen. These @Home projects need to add power management options to their software. My home computer's CPU gets scaled down to 25% (about 800Mhz) while idle, or doing while non-intensive stuff like basic web-browsing. Certainly there is some extra space in there that could be filled with @Home calculations without causing the CPU to ramp back up to full power. As long as the APIs are public (which I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be) then it should be trivial to have the

I think what needs to happen is for the software to prominently display a meter of how much power its using, and some at least rough estimate using ip geolocation of what the cost per hour/day/month is.

Your power management solutions aren't a bad idea, but giving people the ability to control for a parameter that they are only dimly aware of isn't really going to solve the problem. You have to KNOW your spending $30 bucks a month per computer supporting @home before you can even start the process of adjusti

Also a very good idea. Thank you for taking my idea and running with it. I was more under the mindset that anyone running an @Home program probably already has a decent grasp on what it's costing them, and giving them a tool to manage that as they wish. Adding another layer above that would certainly help more people make an informed decision on what they're doing, while helping save some of the legwork for those that already are informed.

Are you say that you nuke the OEM windows from your computer to install Microsoft Windows? Most OEMs don't send you a windows install anymore, you get an image of the OEM install which puts all of the shovel-ware back.

Back when computers had very poor power management, that might have been borderline reasonable. But it's been almost a decade since dynamic frequency and voltage scaling became mainstream, and to do it now would be basically criminal (stealing considerable amounts of electricity for your own purposes, shortening folks' component lifespans due to higher temperature etc while you're at it).

Maybe not, but i think its a stupid idea. For 99% of the people the best would be a 1W thin client with no computational power. The computing centers will be more efficient in using the "unused" computational power.

No, because the Higgs can and will be discovered or disproved without any such home user aid. the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere would be a more profound one than the final piece of the Standard Model.

Finding the Higgs is not worth anything, if the planet goes bust, especially since there is no plan B, say a Mars colony or transmitting the find or our genome to aliens(like in Species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_(film) [wikipedia.org] ).

You don't really find a single Higgs boson. You can't detect the Higgs directly. You have to detect its decay processes (usually, a pair of taus or photons), which can also be produced by other processes. You find it statistically: if you get more of those pairs than is accounted for by understood processes, and if the amount of the excess corresponds to the mount of excesses you'd expect from the Higgs, AND if the machine is running at an energy that you'd expect to produce the Higgs, you get to call it a detection.

So you can count up how many Higgs events you thought there were, and then repeat the experiments focusing on the energy range you think the Higgs has. So, it's not quite the "eureka" moment you might hope for, but it's good enough to confirm the Standard Model.

Whether all of that was really "worth it"... well, that's something else altogether.

You don't really find a single Higgs boson. You can't detect the Higgs directly. You have to detect its decay processes (usually, a pair of taus or photons), which can also be produced by other processes. You find it statistically: if you get more of those pairs than is accounted for by understood processes, and if the amount of the excess corresponds to the mount of excesses you'd expect from the Higgs, AND if the machine is running at an energy that you'd expect to produce the Higgs, you get to call it a detection.

So you can count up how many Higgs events you thought there were, and then repeat the experiments focusing on the energy range you think the Higgs has. So, it's not quite the "eureka" moment you might hope for, but it's good enough to confirm the Standard Model.

Whether all of that was really "worth it"... well, that's something else altogether.

So what is the actual benefit in finding this theorized particle? So we "find" it by actually only seeing it's after effects, what then? What practical application will it serve or will it just be a stepping stone to finding the next sub atomic particle or some answer to an abstract theory? Wikipedia didn't help much as I'm a typical layman and only took physics in college.

The benefit from finding it is that you know that your model works. This is a particularly crucial piece of the model: it explains why mass happens. The model predicts a number of particles responsible for things like atoms holding together and neutrons occasionally decaying into protons. We found all those particles.

It also explains why mass works, and clearly it's important to get that right. We'll know if it's right if we can find the particle. If we don't find it, we have to go back to the drawing

Considering how the idea of god has fucked up tens of billions of lives, wasting hundreds of Trillions of dollars of productivity and quality of life, it's worth a couple dozen $billion to straighten that fact out.

I don't believe in God either, but finding the Higgs is far from proof of that.

It's yet another data point that science produces answers about how the universe came into being, and religion doesn't. There are already so many data points that the curve that fits them is obvious, but adding yet another isn't going to change the mind of anybody so fixated that they haven't already drawn it.

The "6,000 year old universe" is an idea so misbegotten that I pronounce anybody who believes it a fool. But there are o

In your life time it probably won't make your life better. Once it's has or has not been confirmed i'm sure someone in the future will find some practical use for knowing. Unfortunately we will never live long enough to find out.

Have to use Oracle VirtualBox? Have to run with 32-bit compatibility libraries? Sorry, those are showstoppers.Let me run it in the sandbox of my choice, and I'll invest electricity in running this. Otherwise, no.

yup, thats a bummer. In this day and age of Web 2.0 and javascript, wonder why none of these @home have a web client so even a kid can do it. Just go to a link, stay there, let the javascript do the work. No installation, nothing native, just works.

In this day and age of Web 2.0 and javascript, wonder why none of these @home have a web client so even a kid can do it. Just go to a link, stay there, let the javascript do the work. No installation, nothing native, just works.

This project runs very large CERN software packages with complex dependencies that cannot be easily ported to all the volunteers' operating systems (Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X). For this reason, we use a virtualization solution, which enables us to run complex codes independently of your platform. Additionally, using virtualization adds an extra layer of security, as if something goes wrong in the code executi

Do they really expect that many people to take part? There is already SETI@Home, Folding@Home, and a few others I can't think of ATM. IMO Folding@home is most useful of these (huge potential medical usefulness), so they've got that down, and SETI is, well, kinda cool. I can understand if you're a huge physics buff, but I don't know too many people like that. And I'm not sure why you want to do simulations of particle collisions when you can do the real thing and get real results.

There area a couple of other ones like GIMPS and Tiles@Home but again both of those fall into a category like LHC@Home where you are a buff and probably have a smaller following. Usually things like this get an initial following since it is new and then it falls off since people lose interest. I have run a number of the @Home projects at one time or another and I eventually discovered I can come up with a better use for the cpu cycles and electrons I pay for.

i'm not a huge physics buff (only did advanced high school level physics, no quantum/relativity stuff or anything), but i would probably run LHC before SETI, if only because i hope we as a race get more advanced.

Not sure about Folding though, that seems like a very noble goal as well, although somehow intuitively i sort of expected it to turn up some significant stuff by now already

You act like particle physics has no practical applications. It may be hard to see what the practical applications of finding the Higg's boson would be, but it's like Faraday said when asked what use electricity had. His response? "Madam, of what use is a new born child?"

I'm more questioning if the effort put into designing this program will be worth the return based on the number of people who actually use it. I love physics, but I know lots of people don't. If it's hard to see the practical usage, a lot of people won't dedicate their CPU time to it. I might, as might some on/., but I can't imagine many beyond that will. Maybe that's all they need.

This should be a seriously distant second to any similar projects in the medical sector (i.e., Folding@Home). Yes, this stuff could result in things like superconductors or the holy grail of sustainable power-producing nuclear fusion. Maybe. Someday. A far distant third place would be helping to find alien civilizations (Don Henley: "They're not here, they're not coming").

Because of science like this, we had knowledge about quantum physics and we knew what electrons are and how they work. Because of that we have transistors and computers. Because of computers we have modern medical equipment and Folding@Home.

Also "holy grail of sustainable power-producing nuclear fusion" could help getting rid of air pollution and save 2 million people every year[1].

massive power afforded to it by desktops across the globe, CERN may finally break-down and ask its wife, who will most certainly know where the higgs boson was the last time she saw it in multidimensional timespace.

That would be pretty awesome to see. Hopefully they'll use one of those Compaq computers from the late 80's. They had a steel chassis and were heavy as hell. Throw one in with an Osborne Luggable. If you accelerate those bad boys to the speed of light & smash 'em together, any spare Higgs Bosons stuck inside will be sure to come flying out.

Hopefully they'll use one of those Compaq computers from the late 80's. They had a steel chassis and were heavy as hell. Throw one in with an Osborne Luggable. If you accelerate those bad boys to the speed of light & smash 'em together, any spare Higgs Bosons stuck inside will be sure to come flying out.

They'll come flying out alright. Probably land somewhere in texas. Along with whatever parts of the LHC don't end up in China or Australia.

I always find it funny that the same folks who are advocating stuff like this are also advocating using less power at home. I think organizations that are going to ask folks to engage in distributed computing projects should be required to meed some equivalent carbon footprint goals (carbon credits or whatever) as they would if they were doing the same level of processing in their own data center.

If my computer does not heat up the room then the radiator has to do it.

Still, a radiator run by a natural gas furnace is more efficient than an electric heater. Where I live, electricity is about 4x more expensive per kWh compared to gas. Of course, if you live in an area with cheap hydro power, and no gas lines, things are different.

They're just SAYING they're looking for the Higgs. But what they're actually trying to do is corner the world BitCoin market! With the U.S's Credit Rating being downgraded they're anticipating BitCoin becoming the new international currency standard.

I already had VirtualBox 4.1.0 installed, so I installed the Boinc client, attached to http://boinc01.cern.ch/test4theory [boinc01.cern.ch] and created an account without problem - I haven't done any @home projects since some SETI units about 10 years ago.

The Boinc client spent several minutes downloading a linux virtual machine (boinc_vm) for VirtualBox, which booted automagically. Then boinc_vm started "..fetching input files for job..." for a minute, "started a child process", downloaded some more data, and started burnin

Of course this question would probably be better directed to one of the CERN folks, but...

Apparently the apps which actually do the work use a Scientific Linux base system with a bunch of software installed, and they don't want to try to port this whole stack so they're having people use VirtualBox and a VM image. But what about people who are already using Scientific Linux, people who'd be willing to run SL, or people who would be interested in dedicating a machine to the task? Wouldn't the speedups involv

I used to run a couple of the distributed computing programs years back, but I don't anymore. The main reason is that computers have advanced. 10 years ago, a computer sitting idle and a computer under a heavy work load used almost the same amount of power. Therefore, as long as your were going to leave the computer on anyway, it didn't hurt to run one of these programs. However, newer CPUs use much less power when they are idle compared to running a heavy work load. I wish CERN the best of luck, but it see

I mean, how much did this thing cost? $9 billion? And it was way over budget. They couldn't add one or two supercomputers?

Plus, it's an ugly experiment to begin with. Just throwing more and more energy at it to see if there might be a glimpse of a particle that might or might not exist. And if we don't find it, we won't even know for sure it doesn't exist. There's no beauty in it.